Decibel: The Relational Dataset Branching System

Summary: Relational dataset branching with built-in version control enables concurrent analysis and provenance tracking. Evaluates three versioned storage engines for fast queries and low storage, plus an exhaustive benchmark for future design. (summarized by gpt-5-nano on Feb 09 2026)

Paper ID: hd730a3c2d7bf051a
Venue: VLDB
Year: 2016
Pagerank: 8.6997852e-05
Overall Rank: 2,282 | 84.67%
DOI: 10.14778/2947618.2947619
PDF: Download (CC BY-NC-ND 4.0)

Incoming Non-self Citations Over Time

Authors

1. Michael Maddox (Massachusetts Institute of Technology)
2. David Goehring (Massachusetts Institute of Technology)
3. Aaron J. Elmore (University of Chicago)
4. Samuel Madden (Massachusetts Institute of Technology)
5. Aditya Parameswaran (University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign)
6. Amol Deshpande (University of Maryland)

BibTeX Citation

@article{maddox_vldb16,
        title = {{Decibel: The Relational Dataset Branching System}},
        author = {Maddox, Michael and Goehring, David and Elmore, Aaron J. and Madden, Samuel and Parameswaran, Aditya and Deshpande, Amol},
        journal = {PVLDB},
        series = {{VLDB} '16},
        volume = {9},
        number = {9},
        pages = {624--635},
        doi = {10.14778/2947618.2947619},
        url = {https://doi.org/10.14778/2947618.2947619},
        year = {2016}
}

Incoming Citations (Sorted by Pagerank)

Showing 18 of 18 citing papers.

Rank	Citing Paper	Year	Venue	Pagerank
972	The Data Civilizer System	2017	CIDR	0.00012757732
1,692	MISTIQUE: A System to Store and Query Model Intermediates for Model Diagnosis	2018	SIGMOD	9.8526476e-05
1,881	Ground: A Data Context Service	2017	CIDR	9.4372419e-05
1,994	OrpheusDB: Bolt-on Versioning for Relational Databases	2017	VLDB	9.232331e-05
3,276	ForkBase: An Efficient Storage Engine for Blockchain and Forkable Applications	2018	VLDB	7.4656105e-05
4,675	Data Platform for Machine Learning	2019	SIGMOD	6.4728435e-05
4,804	Improving Reproducibility of Data Science Pipelines through Transparent Provenance Capture	2020	VLDB	6.4074452e-05
5,117	ORPHEUSDB: A Lightweight Approach to Relational Dataset Versioning	2017	SIGMOD	6.265064e-05
5,255	Dagger: A Data (not code) Debugger	2020	CIDR	6.2057681e-05
6,048	Your notebook is not crumby enough, REPLace it	2020	CIDR	5.9024167e-05
6,656	Hindsight Logging for Model Training	2021	VLDB	5.7174927e-05
6,866	Analysis of Indexing Structures for Immutable Data	2020	SIGMOD	5.6581649e-05
7,450	DEX: Query Execution in a Delta-based Storage System	2017	SIGMOD	5.5216578e-05
7,999	TardisDB: Extending SQL to Support Versioning	2021	SIGMOD	5.4088344e-05
9,304	DataDiff: User-Interpretable Data Transformation Summaries for Collaborative Data Analysis	2018	SIGMOD	5.1971324e-05
10,135	Optimizing Time Series Queries with Versions	2024	SIGMOD	5.0727027e-05
11,086	Generic Version Control: Configurable Versioning for Application-Specific Requirements	2025	CIDR	4.9769913e-05
11,260	Vive la Différence: Practical Diff Testing of Stateful Applications	2025	VLDB	4.9769913e-05

Outgoing Citations (Sorted by Pagerank)

Showing 11 of 11 cited papers.

Citations counted here include only citations to other VLDB/SIGMOD/CIDR/PODS papers in this database.

Rank	Cited Paper	Year	Venue	Pagerank
19	A Critique of ANSI SQL Isolation Levels	1995	SIGMOD	0.00058759613
709	Archiving Scientific Data	2002	SIGMOD	0.00014605778
727	Serializable Snapshot Isolation in PostgreSQL	2012	VLDB	0.00014456009
1,086	DataHub: Collaborative Data Science & Dataset Version Management at Scale	2015	CIDR	0.0001209772
1,355	Principles of Dataset Versioning: Exploring the Recreation/Storage Tradeoff	2015	VLDB	0.00010921447
2,024	Change-Centric Management of Versions in an XML Warehouse	2001	VLDB	9.1650839e-05
2,847	Transaction Time Indexing with Version Compression	2008	VLDB	7.9411756e-05
3,076	Performance Evaluation of a Temporal Database Management System	1986	SIGMOD	7.6732578e-05
3,207	Fully Persistent B+-trees	1991	SIGMOD	7.5362162e-05
3,736	The BT-Tree: A Branched and Temporal Access Method	2000	VLDB	7.0612886e-05
7,156	Minuet: A Scalable Distributed Multiversion B-Tree	2012	VLDB	5.5953223e-05

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#	Overall Rank	Paper	Year	Venue
1	5,117	ORPHEUSDB: A Lightweight Approach to Relational Dataset Versioning	2017	SIGMOD
2	8,153	DeltaNI: An Efficient Labeling Scheme for Versioned Hierarchical Data	2013	SIGMOD
3	7,210	Dataset Relationship Management	2019	CIDR
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5	7,999	TardisDB: Extending SQL to Support Versioning	2021	SIGMOD
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7	1,994	OrpheusDB: Bolt-on Versioning for Relational Databases	2017	VLDB
8	13,801	Effective Data Versioning for Collaborative Data Analytics	2020	SIGMOD
9	1,355	Principles of Dataset Versioning: Exploring the Recreation/Storage Tradeoff	2015	VLDB
10	1,086	DataHub: Collaborative Data Science & Dataset Version Management at Scale	2015	CIDR